Childhood obesity has been increasing in recent years. For a long time, the main ways to prevent it have focused on encouraging healthy eating and regular physical activity. Now, researchers at Yale suggest another important factor should be added: reducing stress in parents.
A research team led by Yale psychologist Rajita Sinha found that lowering parental stress may help reduce the risk of obesity in young children. “It’s the third leg of the stool,” Sinha said. “We already knew that stress can be a big contributor. The surprise was that when parents handled stress better, their parenting improved, and their young child’s obesity risk went down.”
To explore this, researchers conducted a 12-week study with 114 parents. All had children between two and five years old who were overweight. Parents were placed in one of two groups. One group took part in a program called Parenting Mindfully for Health (PMH). It taught mindfulness and self-control skills, along with guidance on healthy nutrition and physical activity. The other group received only counseling on nutrition and exercise. During the program, researchers recorded parent stress levels and measured the children’s weight.
By the end of the study, only the PMH group showed lower parent stress, improved parenting, and less unhealthy eating in their children. Three months later, these children did not show significant weight gain. In the control group, parents did not experience these improvements. Their children gained more weight and were six times more likely to fall into a higher obesity risk category.
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